Running for Speed: Part 2

Knowing the Right Speeds to Train and Race 

What you and your coach really need to know is how fast you should be able to run other distances such as a 5km, 8km, 12km and so on so they can give you at least an approximate idea of how fast you should be running, depending on how far you're going in each session.

The speeds you are asked to train at should take into account the fact that you're not going to be able to run 12km at the same speed as you ran a 10km time trial at 100%. It should also take into account that you're not going to be able to run at your 100% speed, for any given distance, every time you train.

Progressing your Running Fitness

How does your running program progress you? 

If you're asked to do your next run 5% faster than last time do you think you could stick to it?

Even a mind set of increasing speeds by 5% will often be enough for us to increase speed 0.5-1kph, leading to an increased effort intensity of more like 15-20%. What seems like a small increase in speed over 30-90mins often magnifies the intensity effect, leading to lactate buildup and detrimental pacing.

Interval Training
If you're doing interval training, your programme needs to be able to give you faster and slower speeds which take into account the fact that it's going to be much harder, if not impossible to maintain the same average pace (that's average speed of entire run) as you would be able to hold in an even paced run.

Don't agree?

Try running your next race at significantly different speeds each kilometre and see how you get on...it didn't work for the hare when he raced the tortoise!!

The best runners in the world run negative splits (first half of the race slightly slower than the second half) but to most it would look as if they're running the entire race at the exact same speed. Their ability to keep such an even pace is part of what makes them such good runners as they're less likely to go too quick in the first half, putting them into that state discussed in Part 1.

Knowing your Speeds

There are means of finding what speeds you should run at and a few on-to-it running coaches know these means. There are many calculations involved in creating a program, dealing with times, speeds and conversion factors. Many coaches simply don't have time to do the math.

You can see how STS Running uses these methods to create intelligent running program on the STS Website

So assuming you do know how fast to run in k/h or mins/km, how do you then know how fast you're going? Read Part 3 to find out.